MOSCOW, October 13. /TASS/. The modification and type of the Buk missile, as well as the position of the Buk missile system that brought down the Malaysian Flight MH17 Boeing in 2014, suggest that the Ukrainian Armed Forces might have downed the airliner, Alexander Luzan, a former deputy chief of the Russian army air defense, said on Tuesday.

"The 9M38, 9M38M, 9M38M1 missiles are former modifications of the Buk system missiles, but they all have the same warhead. They are not in service with the Russian Armed Forces, but Ukraine has them. And we have been for the past 15 years using missiles of another type — 9M317," Luzan said.

"This Buk does not belong to the militias [of the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic — DPR], the more so it had not been transferred to the militias by Russia, we simply have no such modifications of Buk missiles. Based on the modification and type of the used missile, as well as its location, this Buk belongs to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. By the way, Ukraine had three military districts — the Carpathian, Odessa and Kiev, and these three districts had more than five Buk anti-aircraft missile brigades of various modifications - Buk, Buk-M, Buk-M1, which means that there were more than 100 missile vehicles there," Luzan said.

Chief of the flight-test centre of the Research Institute of Civil Aviation Ruben Yesayan told TASS that according to the rules of the International Civil Aviation Association (ICAO), if hostilities are underway in a country, it must close its routes for civil aircraft. Furthermore, if a plane falls in a country, this country should organise an investigation, but "instead, Ukraine conducted combat operations there, its Su-25 planes were flying in bombing raids in the area of Donetsk.".